Israel and the Palestinians

Another shove?

What Ariel Sharon will tell George Bush next week, and what Mr Bush should say

WHEN George Bush said three years ago that Ariel Sharon was a “man of peace”, Arabs were not the only people who winced. At that time, Israel and the occupied territories were still in the grip of the intifada. A suicide bomber from the Palestinian Islamist group, Hamas, had just killed 30 Jews at their Passover supper in the seaside resort of Netanya. Israel's prime minister had responded to this and a blitz of similar atrocities by sending Israel's army bloodily back into the Palestinian towns and villages it had given over to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) as part of the glacial Oslo peace process. Peace seemed far from anyone's agenda.

Next Monday, April 11th, George Bush will meet his fellow rancher (Mr Sharon has one within mortar range of the Gaza strip) in Texas, in what look like utterly transformed conditions. With Mr Arafat dead, the PA is now headed by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), a man with whom both Mr Sharon and Mr Bush are willing to do business. The Palestinians have suspended their intifada: most of the armed factions have agreed to observe a truce, though they call it merely a tahdia, or “lull”. During this period, the Palestinians have held presidential elections in the West Bank and Gaza, and intend to hold parliamentary ones in July. Most astonishingly, Mr Sharon has battered down the right wing of his own Likud Party and got his parliament to order the uprooting—by force if necessary—of all 7,000 or so Israeli settlers in the Gaza strip. The “man of peace” sobriquet no longer sounds so jarring.

The question is: peace on what terms? Those with long memories can find comfort in the fact that over the past three decades Arabs and Jews alike have retreated from extreme positions. Most Arabs no longer demand the end of Israel; most Israelis have shaken off the spell that descended in the 1970s, when Likud governments dreamt of a Greater Israel ruling for ever all the territories captured in 1967. Now that Mr Sharon has promised to give up Gaza, the territorial part of the conflict has shrunk to Lilliputian dimensions, focusing now on a sliver of land—perhaps 10% or 12% of the West Bank, though including all Jerusalem—which Mr Sharon wants to keep even after a final peace, and which he is demarcating by means of Israel's controversial “security” barrier. Surely all it takes is one determined American shove to close the gap once and for all?

Maybe. The fly in the ointment is that when Mr Sharon (and, soon afterwards, Mr Abbas) meet Mr Bush, both will plead that they have risked their political—and real—lives just to get this far, and that another shove could tip them from power. Moreover, both will be telling something close to the truth. In order to quit Gaza, Mr Sharon has not only split his party but pointed Israel towards violent confrontation with its powerful national-religious settler movement, parts of which threaten mutiny and murder in order to block him. Although it is too much to say that Israel is teetering to civil war, Mr Sharon has bent and stretched his democratic mandate to the utmost. He will ask Mr Bush to desist from further demands—such as a complete freeze on Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank—while he pushes the Gaza withdrawal through.

Mr Abbas is far weaker. The elections that made him president conferred position, not power. Even if they were fully under control, which they are not, the PA's security services are in no position to impose his will on Hamas, whose popularity has risen steadily during the intifada. Hamas is holding fire now not because it fears Mr Abbas, but because it is confident that he will fail to win an independent Palestine by negotiation, and hopes in the interim to use the lull to bolster its power. Given his weakness, Mr Abbas will tell Mr Bush that he cannot uproot Hamas by force. His only hope is to tame it by co-option, by giving it a formal place in the PA itself.

Exploit the symmetry

When two leaders come to call, each pleading his domestic vulnerability, what is a poor American president to do? For the time being, Mr Bush would indeed be wise to postpone any dramatic new diplomacy until after Israel has completed its withdrawal from Gaza. This move has the potential both to make life a good deal better for the people of Gaza and to set a precedent for a further Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. That is why Israel's settlers hate it, and why nothing should be done to prevent Mr Sharon from seeing the plan through.

In the meantime, however, Mr Bush can strengthen the domestic position of each of his visitors by making demands of the other. A year ago he helped Mr Sharon sell his Gaza plan at home by confirming the obvious: that in a final peace Israel will keep some settlement blocks in the West Bank. He should now use all necessary pressure to compel Israel to freeze new settlement—including the provocative expansion of Maale Adumim (see article)—as called for by the international “road map”. He should then tell Mr Abbas what is obvious too: that although America does not expect him to launch a war he cannot win against Hamas, his value as an interlocutor will in the end depend on his being able to impose his authority. On neither side of this conflict will men of peace prevail against extremists by continuing to appease them.